U.s. Rethinks Rules On Granting Asylum

WASHINGTON — After a decade of debate, the Justice Department has drafted new rules to protect the rights of foreigners who seek asylum in the United States and fear persecution in their homelands.

Immigration lawyers said the new procedures, if carried out properly, would help remove political considerations from asylum decisions and could make it easier for some victims of persecution to gain refuge in this country. Last year 9,229 people were granted asylum, and 31,547 applications were denied.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, a part of the Justice Department, received a record number of asylum applications last year, 101,679. More than 77,000 are pending.

A confidential draft of the new rules shows that the Justice Department intends to establish ``a corps of professional asylum officers who are to receive special training in international relations and international law,``

so they could rule on asylum applications with full knowledge of political conditions in the immigrant`s home country.

Immigration officials said they expected to issue the final rules this summer, but the Office of Management and Budget has delayed publication of the rules and is insisting that the Justice Department find a way to offset the cost.

Immigration officials said the cost, mainly for personnel and office equipment, would be $5.5 million a year.

Budget officials say it could be five times that.

Arthur C. Helton, director of the refugee project of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said last week that the new rules ``could be a positive step forward and could help aliens get asylum, assuming the rules are carried out in good faith, with sufficient resources and adequate training for the new asylum officers.``

Under the rules, the government would ``maintain a documentation center with information on human rights conditions`` in various countries.

Asylum officers would use such information in deciding whether immigrants faced persecution at home.

The Justice Department has been operating under ``interim rules`` since the Refugee Act of 1980 established a uniform standard for granting political asylum.

Federal efforts to rewrite those rules over the last decade prompted objections from immigration lawyers, who said the government was undercutting the rights of immigrants.

Under the 1980 law, an immigrant in the United States may qualify for asylum if it can be shown there is ``a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.``

A person granted asylum may later become a permanent resident.

Numerous studies have concluded that decisions to grant or deny asylum were often influenced by political bias, reflecting U.S. foreign policy or the law-enforcement priorities of the immigration service.

The new rules would give immigrants the benefit of the doubt in several areas and would encourage asylum officers to make independent decisions, without necessarily following State Department recommendations.

The new rules say an immigrant seeking asylum in the United States need not prove that he or she would be ``singled out individually for persecution`` in the person`s homeland if it can be shown there is ``a pattern or practice of persecuting the group of persons similarly situated.``

In the past, the immigration service and some federal courts required immigrants to show that they would be singled out for persecution.

Moreover, the new rules say an immigrant may qualify for asylum on the basis of the applicant`s own statements, without corroboration, if the testimony is ``credible in light of general conditions`` in the home country.